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A Wall Street analyst claims that his overseas sources are telling him that Apple has decided on a fix for the antenna problem plaguing the iPhone 4. Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw Capital Group, says that what's being called an "internal bumper" is being added to new phones in order to better insulate the transceiver. According to the Kumar, suppliers in Asia have told him that the change is causing a slowdown in production, which has led the online Apple Store increase to shipping estimates to three weeks.

Kumar told AppleInsider that the fix - which he believes will be revealed at Apple's press conference tomorrow - is "from an engineering perspective... more of a brute force than an elegant addition." Rather than doing a full recall and redesigning the circuitry completely to eliminate the problem, Kumar asserts, Apple is opting to do a "quick fix" to make its customer happy. A more elegant solution, he says, will be implemented on a CDMA version of the iPhone later this year. Kumar has been insisting for months that an iPhone model compatible with Verizon's network will be released later this year.

Kumar's thinking is that Apple is going public with this fix now, ahead of its quarterly earnings report next Tuesday, to try and limit the financial damage of the news. Apple's stock has dropped almost 30 points from its post iPhone 4 launch high, and financial analysts have pegged the cost of a total recall at about $1.5 billion US. According to Mike Abramsky of the Royal Bank of Canada, this would mean about 40 cents a share less profit for the quarter. Analysts expect Apple to announce profit of $3.80 per share.